Tough

By Paul Gray

Legend will someday have it that Author Elmore Leonard became an overnight success with his 23rd novel. Such is not quite the case. True, Glitz (1985) rocketed toward the top of hardback best-seller lists, a feat that earlier Leonard books had not accomplished. Credit for this commercial breakthrough has been given to the huge promotional campaign waged on behalf of Glitz by its publisher. All those ads certainly did not hurt. But Leonard's triumph may have a somewhat less expensive explanation: the devoted readers who enjoyed and passed along the writer's early westerns (Hombre) and those who discovered somewhere along the way his ensuing string of crime and mystery novels (Swag, Stick, LaBrava) finally coalesced into a critical, bookstore-stampeding mass.

Once his diverse audiences caught up with him, Leonard, 61, faced the inevitable problem of an encore. Everyone can relax. Bandits should fill the land with the sound of pages turning. It offers all the suspense, tough talk and local color that anyone could expect, plus a few surprises. Veteran fans may experience the uneasy feeling, toward the end of the book, that Leonard's characteristic hard-boiled fiction is turning a trifle runny inside, that one of the most unsparing chroniclers of U.S. lowlife shows signs of developing a social conscience. They may be right but, like everyone else, will have to read through to the conclusion to find out.

Bandits is its own best plot summary. Part of Leonard's consummate narrative skill is his ability to camouflage complicated exposition as casual chatter. Thus it seems only natural that Jack Delaney, 40, a former jewel thief who has done time at a Louisiana penitentiary, should wind up working at the New Orleans mortuary owned by his brother-in-law Leo. Why is it, Leo wonders aloud, that every time they get a call to collect a corpse from the National Hansen's Disease Center at Carville, Jack calls in sick? Is he afraid of leprosy or what? The next thing Jack knows, he is driving the firm's hearse to a local soup kitchen and picking up a Roman Catholic nun who will oversee the transfer of a body from the Carville hospital back to New Orleans.

Only Lucy Nichols is no longer a member of the Sisters of St. Francis, and the person she and Jack are retrieving is not dead. Amelita Sosa has in fact been smuggled by Lucy out of Nicaragua, footsteps ahead of Colonel Dagoberto Godoy, a murderous former member of the Somoza military dictatorship and now a leader of the contras in their armed struggle against the ruling Sandinistas. The colonel, for rather complex reasons, has come to New Orleans to kill Amelita, his onetime mistress, and to solicit private businessmen for contributions to be used, ostensibly, to arm the contras. The figure he has in mind is $5 million; he carries a letter of recommendation from President Ronald Reagan.

Had Bandits appeared a year ago, this freewheeling use of the Chief Executive might have produced disbelief. Now stretches of the novel seem to run in tandem with daily headlines. This accident of timing may help the book's sales, but Leonard's imaginative license is liable to be mistaken for a matter of fact. That would be unfair because the author makes unlikely events spring from carefully prepared plausibilities, some of which, through no fault of his own, may actually occur.

Who would believe that an ex-nun, an ex-con and some of his pals from prison days could seriously plan to rob a Nicaraguan ex-bigwig before he leaves New Orleans with a small fortune? Who could credit Lucy Nichols' plan for obtaining and spending her share of the loot: the desire to rebuild a clinic in Nicaragua that she saw Colonel Godoy and his contra henchmen destroy? Why would Delaney, safely out of stir and trying to go straight, involve himself in a risky scheme to assist victims of a war of which he is largely ignorant? After hearing Lucy's first explanation of the conflict in Nicaragua, he wonders, "But which were the good guys and which were the bad guys?"

Delaney's question haunts Bandits; it is repeated by other characters and remains unresolved at the end. But little else in the novel stays in doubt. Leonard's confused people are grounded in blindingly clear particulars. Their talk, with the whats slurred ("The hell kind a name was that?" "You talking about?"), sounds gritty and realistic but is actually a highly stylized distillation of normal sloppy speech. Listening to them amounts to a speed- reading course in blighted dreams. One of Delaney's friends confesses, "Jack, what's money? I got enough to last me the rest of my life, if I die Tuesday." Delaney recalls the advice of the man who taught him how to rob hotel rooms: "Always look nice and always ride the elevator. You run into somebody on the stairs they gonna remember you, 'cause you don't see nobody on the stairs as a rule. But a elevator, man, you so close to people they don't see you."

Despite such training, Jack got caught. This time out, his enemies include not only local police but the colonel, the colonel's bodyguards, a suspicious fellow who is probably with the CIA, an interloper from the Irish Republican + Army and, quite possibly, one of the guys he has recruited to help him pull off the heist. "No way," as Leonard's dialogue might describe the problem. And one of the author's indefatigable optimists would surely respond, "Maybe."